Catching Up on Coins and Cards

A couple of threads to update today kiddies, namely 1952 High Numbers and 1980 Baseball Coins, with a wide and wild detour back to Presentation Boards.

I have tabulated responses to my query on a few online forums that was cleverly titled "Where Did You Buy 1952 Topps Baseball High Numbers as a Kid?" The results were mostly supportive of my distribution theories but the sample size is way too small to cement anything except distribution may have been a little wider than I thought.

Confirmed purchases took place in a suburb of Toronto (nice to have that verified), Eastern Massachusetts (presumably Boston or environs), Elizabeth and Jersey City, New Jersey (both just across the North River from Manhattan), Ridley Park, Pennsylvania (a Phildadelphia suburb) and near the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. These were late summer/fall 1952 purchases from what I can gather. North Carolina is interesting as it is well past the MLB territory of the time and gets us into the true South.

Looking westward, substantive purchases (two full runs from packs) were made by Roger Neufeldt of Sports Memories (one of the nicest guys you will ever meet) and whom I believe lived in Oklahoma City at the time of purchase (1952). That's farther afield than I would have thought and may demonstrate the spotty distribution the highs had in '52. Stabbing further westward we have Los Angeles, seemingly much later in 1952 and Rialto, CA,a San Bernardino 'burb in 1953 at a Rexall drug store (they had thousands of stores nationwide at the time) which is a connection I want to explore further as it may have something to do with the distribution of the cards. Woolworth's was allso a big seller of Topps 1952 baseball but I am not sure about their relationship with the high numbers.

There were also numerous stories of people not being able to find them in their neighborhoods after being able to find semi-highs. I did not track (yet) where they could not be found however but do note one such place was Buffalo, New York which I had previously theorized may hot have gotten the highs in '52.

There are also recollections of people buying the cards in 1953 wrapper sbut getting fistfuls of 52's. This brings up three good points: 1) Every account I have read involves highs from '52 only being bought in nickel packs, so were they sold in penny packs that year? 2) Does this explain why there are dated and undated wrappers (penny and nickel variants exist for each year) from 1953-55? 3) Did Topps therefore consistently "reload" the previous year's high numbers in current packs during this time and if so, why?

Questions, questions....now we move to an answer, or at least an advice concerning the population of 1980 Topps Baseball Coins with reports of Carew in Bronze and Silver:

Carew Bronze 3
Garvey Bronze 1
Jackson Bronze 2 (plus one unconfirmed)
Carew Silver 1 (plus one unconfirmed)
Garvey Silver 2
Jackson Gold 3

All we need for a full player/metal Master Set is a Silver Jackson and Gold Carew and Garvey. Still no word on which ones have punch holes though.

Following the coins and their state of being, a few more presentation boards have shown upon Ebay. You may recall these were used for internal Topps "pitch" meetings and were most probably created by their Art Department. A few more details are known now (hooray) thanks to four pieces being auctioned by BMW Sportscards, alas one looks to have been sold and has disappeared but we have these still):



That's the 1966 Black Bat Batman Set, which shows how far back these go (which is around the time Topps moved facilities from Brooklyn to Duryea, PA). Here is the back of the board:



The numeral "1" makes a lot of sense as these would have been placed on large easels and handled manually, so an order of presentation would need to be established.

The next year a pitch was made for Crazy Comics:



These would become a scarce set called Krazy Little Comics, which looks to have been both tested and then on a very limited basis, perhaps due to threat of a lawsuit or two from the companies the little comic books were parodying. The back loses the border but retains the numeral "1":



We then jump ahead to 1977 and the set that sold and sold-Star Wars:



It's hard to tell here but the auction description indicates the C3PO sticker is original artwork-they painted his head over a 1976 Star Trek Sticker of Dr. McCoy!! We lose the numeral on the back for this one, so this may have been prepared for an initial review and not a full "pitch":



Sorry I missed out on grabbing a scan of the fourth board but ya snooze ya lose!

Coin Flip

My recent posts on the 1980 Topps Baseball Coins have generated the most interest of anything blogged about here since the 1966 Punchboards had their checklist inflated out of the blue a while back. I'm a little surprised at all the attention but these are pretty rare birds after all and we are not done with them quite yet as another surprise is in store.

Our story begins today with scans of the Reggie Jackson and Steve Garvey coins in their aboriginal state, namely on an internal Topps presentation "pitch" of a type seen previously, and clinches the fact for me that these were internally produced proofs for a set that never got the green light. This set is slowly revealing its secrets:



Shown are a front and reverse each of the gold Jackson and silver Garvey we saw here last time out, held on with double sided tape when purchased by our present lucky owner. This particular one predates the Scott Gaynor buyout of a former Topps sales rep earlier this century as it was purchased in 1995, at a flea market no less!

Back in 1980 you didn't use Powerpoint to make a a concept pitch to management, you had the Art Dept. create it for you, at least at Topps. The other metal (bronze) and player (Carew) known in this set probably also had their own board at some point, possibly shared with a bronze Jackson. Here are the back details of our two boys, first Reggie:



Then Steve:




The presently known population of the coins is small:

Carew Bronze 2
Garvey Bronze 1
Jackson Bronze 2
Garvey Silver 2
Jackson Gold 3

There is a credible report of a silver Carew and a possible third bronze Reggie. Some have a hole punched in the top, and I will post scans of these if I can get them. I am thinking there have to be at least two of each coin produced so a front and back could have been mounted for the pitch but still don't know if each is player minted in each type of metal, especially since only the Bronze run features all three at present. So we still would like to find a silver Jackson and gold Carew and Garvey. Given possible mixes and matches in the presentation, I think about four of each metal/player would have been produced in this type of scenario. Topps must have had an outside vendor cast these. I am also advised they are quite light and do not have the heft of a regular coin.

More to come folks!

Stand Up Guys

Happy 2010 intrepid readers!

Continuing on with last year's final post, presented are two more Topps prototypes provided by Scott Gaynor.

First up is another stab at a Punchout game:



And following we have an in-house presentation for baseball mini stickers:



These were probably produced around 1976, as evidenced by the player selection and team affiliations and I have to think they were developed together as the similarities are many.

This design of each eventually looks to have made its way in a modified format onto a product called Superstar Standups, sold by Topps in 1991 and having candy within. Surprisingly, these are not all that easy to find these days. Here is a scan I nabbed from Ebay, showing the 1991 product:



I remember this set from 1991 and recall the candy being pretty tasty! These come in both clear and colored containers. At least one type was a test but I am not certain which and have not extended my research into the 1990's in any event, although there was a lot of innovation at the time by Topps.

They Might Be Giants?

I got an e-mail from Scott Gaynor (of Gaynor & Dent Auctions) the other day, inquiring about certain aspects of the 1980 Topps Superstar and undated Puffy Stickers (more on this anon) and as we got into back-and-forthing, Scott sent along some scans of items he had been consigned in 2001 by a Topps salesman. These scans were of different mockups and prototypes used by Topps executives to develop new product and some made it into production, altered sometimes but sometimes not.

These scans will provide fodder for a few upcoming posts but I'll start with an interesting 1975-76 idea for Giant baseball cards:



So not only was Topps thinking small in 1975, they were also thinking big! They didn't issue big baseball cards until 1980, and then they spent the better part of the first half of the MTV decade putting out supersized product. This timeline from development to execution was not unusual for Topps back then.

Stay tuned for more mockups and prototypes in 2010!

QUICK UPDATE-An intrepid reader has noted that the back of the prototype is from 1976. In my haste to post, I missed this important detail.

Topps Action Emblems

This is the culmination of what has turned into a de facto three part series on Topps resistance to certain licensing fees in the early 1970’s. You can see the beginnings here and some further background here. Unable to eliminate the licensing fees to the Major League Baseball Players Association for the use of player likenesses (for obvious reasons) Topps tried to eliminate team logos on certain test and limited release sets in 1973.

It is possible, though far from certain, that Topps may have been asserting they had the right to use team names and logos in all baseball sets they issued, not just the main set, and the Major League Baseball Promotions Corporation (representing the teams) resisted. At some point, the powers that be in Brooklyn elected to create their own version of logos for all 24 teams. The result was a bizarre set called Action Emblems.

Action Emblems were first proofed on cardboard in the winter of 1973 and here is a good look at some of them.

You will notice the large team logo on the upper part of the panel and the smaller city pennant below. (There are different versions for each team in NY and Chicago). Here is a proof panel which clearly shows a date stamp of January 26, 1973.

I am aware of two full proof sheets showing this date as well. Given the proof date, it would point to a spring release and Topps likely tested the emblems, which were cloth stickers

in these packs at first (None of the packs or wrappers are mine):

At some point glossy stickers started to appear, possibly due to an abundance of stock being used for the exploding Wacky Packages stickers. This necessitated a change in the wrapper (still a test version as evidenced by the white wax with a sticker applied to the front).

The word “cloth” has disappeared from the description on the pack! Here is a swiped scan from an auction a while back showing the glossy stockers, which can be differentiated from the cardboard proofs due to the score mark between the upper and lower portions.

The associated Rub Off Game cards were taller than the Action Emblems and account for the “tallboy” pack.

Now the tale turns trickier. Action Emblems have generally been noted as a 1974 issue in the hobby, yet we have proofs from a good year earlier. Why? Well, a short history lesson is in order.

Following Jefferson Burdick’s publication of the final American Card Catalog (ACC) in 1960, “Catalog Updates” --coordinated by famous St. Louis collector and ACC contributor Buck Barker-- began to appear in the “Card Collector’s Bulletin”, an early and widely read (for the time) hobby publication. These were printed from November 1960 to February 1972 and documented and cataloged the various card releases over that period, generally lagging behind by a year or so. Another hobby publication “The Trader Speaks” started around 1967 and also helped document what was hitting the candy store counters and supermarket aisles of America. I mention this because there is much more certainty with the dating of issues since the early 60’s than there had been before, thanks to these publications; a lot of the guesswork that happened with dates of issue for sets was now eliminated. If there was a reference to 1974 for the Action Emblems, it was likely correct. But...

I could never reconcile the date disparity until I happened across an auction for an Action Emblems pack that advertised “2 glossy and 1 cloth” sticker as being in the pack (wording was on the bottom part of the wrapper, not the title). Now as luck would have it, I did not save a scan of that particular pack. If I find it again, I will post it here and also in a short update.

It occurred to me after seeing this pack that the likely chain of events was a 1973 launch date for the original cloth version followed by the hybrid, “2 glossy, 1 cloth” pack later in ’73 or ‘early ’74 followed by a third and final version (again in a test wrapper) that does not note what type of sticker and therefore allowed Topps to sell either or both types. This may have been the final Topps “rewrap” baseball pack, something I will get into in my next post. It is also possible the second and third packs were issued in reverse order.

In my experience, the Scarcity in versions of the Action Emblems, from easiest to hardest, runs:

1)Cloth Sticker

2)Cardboard Proof

3)Glossy Sticker

But don’t take that as gospel, your experience may vary! And you may be interested to know Topps tried this with football as well (not mine):